Spelling backwards revisited

 

Many educators such as Dr. Sam Bommarito have asked me as to why kids should memorise the 220 Dolch words. My retort to that question was ‘Why not!’

The same question is repeated by many other 'educators'. LINK.

The same educators insist that phonics does not work with children because many words are not phonetic.

However, my suggestion that these non-phonetic words may be memorised is detested by these educators. 

Most of these guys who are against rote memorising the Dolch words, many of which are phonetic, are those promoting Reading Recovery and Balanced Literature. They have a narrow vision like horses that wear blinkers.

I know for a fact that rote memorisation of the Dolch words helps kids to read those words fluently and leaves their minds free to work on the other words in a book. Dolch words comprise about 50 to 70% of a child’s book.

I have successfully taught all my ‘dyslexic’ students to read using my book Teach Your Child to Read using phonics as well as memorising the Dolch Words, context clues, word families, and patterns to read new words.

I don’t know what is the big deal with memorising 220 Dolch words when our brains can be trained to do many things including reading backward as can be seen in my post here.

I am not sure what the point of spelling really difficult words backward would be when most are challenging enough to spell forward.

The point is that all kids will be able to memorise the 220 Dolch Words with ease and I don’t understand why educators such as Dr. Sam Bommarito, who calls himself a centrist, discourage kids from memorising them.

I am a CENTRIST and I don’t take sides unlike Dr. Sam Bommarito who consistently keeps saying don’t memorise Dolch Words and phonics does not work for every kid.

I am beginning to wonder if there is a concerted effort to maintain the illiteracy level as it has been for decades.